


Entre les Murs

by Hollybush



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Happy Ending, Extramarital Affairs, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Oliver is married after all, Oliver's POV, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-17 21:27:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13667634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hollybush/pseuds/Hollybush
Summary: I fell in love at 24 and never fell back out.There's consequences to being in love with someone you're not married to.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been years since I wrote anything for any fandom, but this one demanded it, apparently. Unbeta'd, so don't blame anyone but me. I'm having some trouble with the appropriate tagging, so let me know if I need to add anything and I will do so.

Entre le Murs

 

1

 

We’re getting sloppy.

 

We’ve used this hotel 3 times before. I knew this before coming here, of course. I remember when we were here, could probably tell you the number of the rooms we stayed in, if it came to it. I don’t care about any of the places we stay in, but they become important anyway, important enough to sear into my brain, to remember for the rest of my days. Every single room we’ve been in, I remember. I don’t understand why because while we’re there, I don’t register anything about it. I only have eyes for him. But later, _later!_ , when I’m home and I sit on the floor of my less-and-less-dingy bathroom floor and let the water beat me down, I go back to that room and I have no trouble picturing every little detail.

 

I remember the thick, almost furry, green walls of that first hotel room, back when. Back when the first word we’d said to each other were our own names. After 2 years apart, seeing him coming out of that music shop on 18th, curls in disarray and squinting into the sun, I couldn’t not say it.

 

I think back to that moment all the time, it fills every breath between classes, every coffee break where I choose to remain in my classroom, closing my eyes and letting the sun on my face take me back to ‘83. Still, even if I deliberately took the detour past that shop, only because it reminded me of him and I needed that one moment of _maybe_...I never expected it to actually happen.

 

I’m not sure I even wanted it to happen. It took me years to work up the nerve to ask myself that question and it might be years more before I know the answer. I’ve stopped asking now regardless.

 

The truth is pure and simple anyway: it’s too late. He was there and I did see him and that sealed our fate. I was never going to walk away again. I knew that right away, the moment I saw those curls blowing every which way and watched, mesmerised, as he shook his sunglasses out of his bag, one hand trying to hold onto books and sheet paper, the other rummaging around in _that_ backpack.

 

I was never going to let him go, and I was, at once, okay with that.

 

I wasn’t a cheater, never had been and I am confident enough to say I never would have been, if not for him.

 

_I know myself too well._

 

It’s still true. I hear people talk about affairs as if they just happened to them, as if they didn’t have a choice. What a luxury that must be, I always think, and I always back away from such conversations. Because I can’t make that claim. I knew what I was doing when I stepped towards him that day and called him by my name.

 

I knew, just like I knew I was never going to regret it.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy St. Valentine's Day. What better way to celebrate love?

 

_2_

 

 

That first hotel room, the green one, had one leather chair in the corner, by the dresser. It didn’t match anything else in the room. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. Elio’s red shirt, the same one he’d worn the day we met, was draped over the arm and my shoe was right underneath it. That image stays with me, more than anything else from that night.

We always have one night. One only. It’s not something that’s been forced upon us. We could have had more. Quite easily, in fact, in the practical sense of the word. He lived near campus during college, sharing a house but not a bedroom and he has his own apartment now, so that wouldn't have been a problem then and isn't now, nor is it why we opt for hotel rooms. He travels, but he has plenty of holidays. I have long vacations and Lis wouldn’t object to me going away for a weekend. We could do it, in that sense. Easily.

But nothing was ever easy about it. That’s why we agreed on one night.

More than one night and I wouldn’t go back. I don’t know if he would. He used to try to convince me to leave, to come with him, travel, move to San Francisco, go anywhere. But I never said yes.

  
I never said no either, but Elio wanted a yes. Still does, I imagine. Only imagine now because he doesn’t ask me anymore. I hope he still does. And I hope he will ask me just one more time. That’s a selfish thing to want, I’m aware. But I have long since let go of the illusion that this is anything but selfish.

I _can’t_ without him. Not anything. I breathe only on the nights I spend with him, forget who I am for every other. I’m alright with that because it’s better than I had in the years I spent without him, after we'd met but before we met again, in the _between_. It feels like a chasm, that time. An abyss. 

Not the years before. The years before…it would be romantic, perhaps, to say that the years before him were empty, that I always knew that it was him I was missing, that I was simply waiting for him. Elio would like it if I said that. He would roll his eyes and turn away in that sly way he has, but his cheeks would tinge pink and he'd clutch just a little harder that night. But I don't because I didn't. I didn’t feel empty, I felt fine. I certainly wasn’t waiting for anyone. I enjoyed my life well enough, never considered any other path than the one I was on. I liked Lis and knew I could love her. It seemed like a good enough spread. 

Of course, it never _pulled_ at me, it never felt like something I couldn’t do without. But I didn’t long for any of that. I never would have, if not for him. It didn't occur to me until after, until the _between_ , that he was the key I hadn't known I needed.

It seems sometimes like blame, the weight that I put on him, and I think it very nearly is. Sometimes, for about 5 minutes, I let myself be angry at him. For shaking my hand and sealing my fate. If I hadn’t met him, then I would have, never would have, could have….but it never lasts because I wouldn’t change a thing. Given the chance to undo it, I would not undo a thing, because I knew.

I chose this then, when I called my name and watched him freeze at the sound of my voice, and I choose it now, every time we meet, every time I think of him. Every single time, I choose him.

 

 

 


	3. 3

 

_3_

 

 

I didn’t actually choose him. That’s what bothers him. It itches, scratches at the surface of us. I think he thinks I don’t want him enough, don’t love him _enough._

 

He doesn’t really believe that, but he fears it, because he no longer believes in _us_ either. He believes in _me_. Still, somehow. I wonder why, more and more as the years pass, because I haven’t given him a reason to for a very long time.

 

I show up at the time and place he emails me. He emails, because a text might be seen. That was his idea. He doesn’t say Lisa's name a lot, but when he does, he winces. I know he tries to hide it but hiding himself was never his thing. He only learned when I re-entered his life and he decided to throw his life away on flung-away meetings once a month.

 

He feels the same way about me as I do about him, so of course he’s not throwing his life away so much as he gives it away. He gives it to me, every time he shows up. 

 

Every single time, I wonder if this will be the time he doesn’t. It’s not a gut feeling that tells me that one day he won’t. I have no room for gut feelings where it concerns him. It’s him, and nothing else whatsoever. Sometimes, when the sun is hiding and I can’t get that summer back on my skin, when it takes a bit longer to remember his face in the grass, I envision being cut open, like an autopsy, and I wonder if people will see him there, because they must. Surely, they must because he’s all there is of me.

 

I tell him these things, because I have to, because I take myself away every time I say ‘later’ and I have to leave him with enough of myself to cling to, the way he does for me. Something to breathe into until I can do so again in his hair, his neck, his skin, his skin, his skin.

 

I can’t take anything but memories, but he can. He steals shirts and boxer shorts sometimes. Took my watch once, back in the beginning, the second or third time.

 

_“want to make sure you come back”_

 

He’d said it with a grin, but his eyes failed to match it and I knew he meant it. I let him take something every time, so he knows. I will never not show up.

 

But he might. He might because at some point, he will want something more. At some point, he will have given so much away, it will no longer be his choice to make. He'll be running on empty and he will _need_ something more. Anything. And there will be someone to offer it.

 

It has happened before. He hasn’t told me about it, but I know. Names he’s omitted from conversations, from stories about school, about work, about friends and drunken escapades. In that hollow, that’s where his options live. He hasn’t taken them yet, but he might.

 

He might.

 

And the thought of it makes me want to promise him the moon, makes me want to take him away to a place, any place, that will allow us to marry. It gets stronger every day, but I don’t tell him _that_. Because I know that would stop him from saying yes to anybody else. He would wait, he would sit back and wait for me to make good on that promise, even if it took another ten years and I am not sure yet that I want him to. I’m not sure yet I want him to say no to anyone else before he’s had the chance to say yes.

 

 


	4. 4

 

 

_4_

 

It wasn’t a planned thing, or a moment I felt coming. Then again, I have been anticipating this moment since perhaps the day I let that train take me away from him, so maybe it’s more that I got used to that feeling of impending deadline. Who the hell knows. I didn’t know it was going to be today though. 

We’re on the way back from a dinner party at one of Lisa’s friends. One of her friends from college had a new boyfriend and as needs must, everyone had to meet him.

 

 _Best to do it all in one go_ , the email-invite had said. _Get it over with_. I had felt an irrational surge of anger at that, not the _get it over with_ maybe, but the stream of smiley faces that followed. Anger because she had the option, at least. She had found someone that made her happy enough to scream it from the proverbial rooftops, to show off to all her friends her newfound happiness, to crack jokes at the rarity of it all. _Life makes sense again_ , she’d said. Now that she had met the person she was supposed to be with.

All her friends could coo over how special that was all they wanted. I’d met that person at 24. I knew. In one of my more bitter moments, usually preceded by either too little hard liquor or too much, I think I was the only there tonight that truly knew.

 

“They’re an odd couple, aren't they.” Lis muses. I’m driving, she doesn’t like to after dark and I can’t blame her. I’m trying to navigate our way through the outskirts of the city, trying to get into the city center without honking at that damn Ford that refuses to let me pass, trying not to shout obscenities, just trying.

“You know what I mean? Like, they don’t make sense.”

I only start listening now really. I’m unsettled for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I just want to go..I just want..I want _something_...

 

I want what I always want.

 

I tune back in. I’ve been silent a beat too long but it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s been said. 

“What do you mean?”

She’s fishing around in her purse for something, it’s a tiny thing, black leather. Classy and unobtrusive.

 

I miss that backpack so much my stomach actually aches. Milk gone sour.

 

“Well, like… _we_ make sense, don’t we? We’ve spent time thinking about our future and if we want the same things and such. That’s why we work. We make sense.”

People say that all the time. Things like we do or don’t or didn’t _make sense_. That sounds like there was a thought process involved. A conscious decision after a considerate balancing of the scales. As if it was a decision to love someone. As if there had been another option.

I never thought about another option, after Elio. There is before Elio and after Elio, and there is the between, the empty, the _without_. But there was certainly no thought process involved. Not in loving him.

I thought too much about the consequences and the price to pay and the damage done. But not about loving him, not about us, never about him.

We just are, we just do. I never think about whether our brains match or our bodies do, and whether or not his favorite books match mine and if I know enough about music or speak enough Italian for us _to make sense_.

 

And suddenly I can feel it, I can feel it slithering its way into the space between us, as Lis explains why she and I make sense and I realize that Elio and I…… _every_ sense is involved but common sense has nothing to do with it and it will be that way forever. I want to keep it that way forever.

 I have been waiting for a moment where it would _make sense_ for me to leave, the moment where it seems _logical_ for me to take that final step.

It is never going to come. I don’t understand how I could have been so incredibly slow.

I stare ahead as Lis moves on to another topic, and I know that tonight is the last night of everything that _makes sense_. 

Sense _is_ what does it then, in the end.

 

The traffic is slow, as it always is on Saturday night, slow and thick. That Ford is not budging. I look to the side, look at Lis as she stares out the window, one hand fiddling with her ring, thumb nail, an earring, look back at that Ford as it signals for the next exit.

I follow the Ford and park the car before she can comment, then I turn to her, and I talk.

 


	5. Chapter 5

_5_

 

 

In the end, it is easier than I thought it would be. I never thought it was going to be hard, not really _,_  but  _before_  I could pretend. I could tell myself that I was doing the right thing, if not for me then for my family and I allowed that thought to make up for those underneath it. Now, with all my truths spilling out and filling open spaces, I don't have that reassurance and it itches. I want to scratch at it until I can pull it off but for as much as I have lied to other people, I’m trying not to lie to myself. This part at least, this price to pay, may be uncomfortable but it's also true.

It wasn’t  _hard_. I wish I could say it hurt to walk out the door, to leave behind the life I’ve known but that, like most other things about it, would be a lie. I knew that life but it never felt like mine. I’d borrowed it from the Oliver that would-have-been, the Oliver-without-Elio that never stood a chance and I though I tried to become that Oliver again, I’m not and I never again will be. Even if Elio says no. Even if he'd said  _yes_  to someone else.

That’s not to say that it was  _easy_. People throw these terms around like it’s either one or the other but there’s enough shades in between to make you dizzy.

It did hurt. It hurt to hurt someone else. Someone who has been nothing but good to me and deserved so much more, but I know that it will be better for her in the end as well and so that hurt will fade. The guilt will linger until her happiness is secured but it will, and then that will fade as well.

These things I’ve said and done to them, my family, will damage them and the traces of that will linger but they won’t fester. Not like the hurt I’ve caused Elio did and probably will for a very long time.

There’s a fear in me that maybe I just have no room for it anymore. It’s like I am leaving not only my old life behind, but the anguish and the guilt and the fear as well and everything that is still there is clouded in relief.

I really do know myself. I’ve always had to. 

My boys I will miss every single day I don’t have them with me but they too, will someday, one day, learn that to choose life means to choose themselves, and to choose themselves must mean to follow what gives you life. Elio gives me life and he has, without a single exception, been the only one.

He is me, that is the end-all.

It took me too long to see that in denying myself him, I was denying myself  _me_. I pray, as I not often do, that my sons will understand this someday. That I will have the opportunity to sit them down and explain that I had to leave their home to find my own. I hope that they will be more careful in their choices, that I can be there to help them make those. If I am lucky enough to have that chance, I know I will not sit there alone.

 

*

 

My belongings fit into 1 bag, the way they did that summer. I left everything Lis wanted or needed and everything else must be the spoils of war. This time, I won’t bring anything to leave behind.  _I_ will stay.

 

*

 

I come up to the door and I do not hesitate. Even if he does not want this, I won’t go back. I will wait for him.

 

*

 

I open the door and hear the shower running. I place my bag on one of the beds and take off my watch. Time can pass now, unnoticed. For the first time since that summer, the early days when the fact that summer would one day end seemed hopelessly far away, time has no bearing.

I stand by the bed and follow the trail of his clothes to the bathroom door. I love how it allows me to imagine, to  _know_ , his order of undressing. First the left shoe, then the right, his jeans, then his shirt, his boxer’s by the door, thrown in the direction of a chair but missing it by a mile.

The shower shuts off and my heart jumps. Jumps. Jumps.

I don’t know what he’ll say but more terrifying still is that I don’t know what  _I_ will say. It feels more important now than ever before that I have the right words and they won’t come. They’re there, I know they are, they’ve been on the tip of my tongue for so long, but they’re refusing me now. 

I’ve talked so much over the past few days, to Lis, to my sons, to my family. I’ve explained and explained, told Lis everything. Every question she had, I answered. Every single thing she wanted to know, I told her. I’m sick and tired of the sound of my own voice, of the tears stuck in my throat and the weight of every word that I took from my own shoulders and placed on hers.

I don’t want to talk anymore.

But I will have to because if I owe anybody anything, it’s him. Always him because he’s been there when I wasn’t and he’s asked but never demanded and he’s never, not once,  _told_  me. I know he’s wanted to, I know what he thought and how he felt and what he wanted me to do, what he wished to the moon and the stars and to Bach I would do, but he’s never told me any of these things, not out loud.

He withholds words but he gives me everything else. I haven’t given him anything  _but_ words. It’s how we’ve managed to balance this book, I think. But right now, I have to. I will have to find the words, drag them up from where I’ve shoved them down and told them to stay again and again, and tell him that I heard every word he never said and that this time, I listened. 

 

*

 

I can hear his rummaging around, hear the slap of a wet towel on the floor and then the door opens.

Wet curls and a miserable hotel towel in his hands doing more harm than good.

“Hey”

He looks up when I don’t speak, lifts an eyebrow. The left corner of his mouth follows.

“What’s going on?” is what he wants to say, starts to say but he trails off when he spots my bag. His entire frame goes rigid, though he tries to hide it, tries to force it into relaxation, the way he did when I touched his shoulder that time.

“Staying an extra night?”

It’s a legitimate question but not a real one. It’s something to say when he has nothing else and is too afraid to ask what he does.

“Just staying.”

I shrug and look at him, my gaze forcing him to look back.

“I thought I would…stay, this time. If you still want me too, that is. If _you_  still want to stay.”

I hadn’t thought about his response, because to think about it, to imagine it, would mean to prepare for every possible outcome, and I did not dare go there.

To see him crumble is not one I would have wanted, ever, but it is not surprising to me.

I catch him before he falls. It sounds dramatic or romantic, depending on your point of view, but there it is. There I am.

I hold him as his hands claw at my back, at my shirt. It pulls tight at my throat and I can’t breathe for a moment but that’s okay because I’ve lived half my life without being able to breathe, I know how to do it.

“Oliver…”

I try, because if anything can get him back to me, it’s that.

“Oliver, Oliver, Oliver.”

He calms, releases his hands a bit, stands a little straighter, up on his toes, to hide his face in my neck.

“Elio”

He pulls back and stares at me, then smiles. It’s a smile I never realized I missed because I haven’t seen it since I whispered at him to call me by his name, in the dark and musky night in a never-forgotten bedroom in Italy all those years ago.

I will see it a lot more from now on.

*

 

I ask him, later, and later no longer means anything but that, how he made himself wait for me. Because he did and we both always knew it. He tells me it’s because he knew I would, one day. I smile at that and then I cry because of course he knew.

He is me, after all, and I know myself too well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I considered not mentioning Oliver's sons but it seemed like the easy way out and this story was never about it being easy, I think.


End file.
